State of Software Amateurism

During the winter months, I was wrapped up in more than a couple discussions with kids who consider themselves to be computer experts (by profession, at the least) who believe that if you aren’t using the latest OS, you are a hillbilly. As of March 2014, the above chart reflects US computer OS use, per a pretty large sample survey.

The statistic that most interests me is “Other,” the 1.99% of users whose technology was, apparently, unimportant to the surveyors. On a recent trip to New Mexico, I met a surprising number of people who run their businesses on old versions of Windows: all the way back to a law office using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a graphic artist using windows 98, a collection of small business owners who network and advertise their group on the web using tools from Windows 95, and several people still on Vista. While we were camped at Elephant Butte State Park, I met a 60’s rock star and I listened to his music recorded on a 1970’s TASCAM 80-8 1/2” reel-to-reel in a camper trailer. He gave me a copy of the soon-to-be-released CD bounced down to MP3 on a free version of studio editing software long-ago-absorbed by Adobe.

The OS-users’ pie chart chart sort of reflects my own experience, although a bit optimistically. Microsoft has been working overtime to convince WinXP users to evacuate the building since the company has ceased “support” of XP. Of course, real computer IT and user types know Microsoft is bullshitting us. Support for business XP users will continue for a while and you can tag on to that gravy train easily. Less obvious is the fact that hackers write hacks for the biggest bang for the buck. The real reason Apple’s OS X is fairly “safe” from identity thieves is that a scant 6-7% of computer users are Apple computer owners. If you really want to be hack-free, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 might be your best bet. Running MSDOS might be the closest thing to total security possible.

Soon, it won’t matter much what sort of PC computer OS you run because the majority of computer users will be tablet and phone nerds. The industry expects tablet sales to almost double desk and laptop PC sales by 2017. Mobile phones are already selling at 5X the PC rate and will approach 10X PC sales in 2017. The smart hacker is already up into your phones’ butt right now and heading for the digestive system.

The kids who run computer companies, especially the technologically inbred CEO/CFO/COO types, could care less about security, since they are in no way obligated by law for the incredible financial losses their companies are responsible for creating. While you have to marvel at the royal way these blessed-by-corruption organizations are treated, as a consumer we need to be more than a little bit suspicious of anything they tell us. The fact is, I believe, the only reason for owning any sort of computer is practical. These instruments are nearly useless as educational devices, incredibly limited as news distribution sources, and as inclined to continue the dumbing-down of our degraded and degenerating species as television. So, worrying about whether we are using the latest version of some half-baked, user-hostile bullshit software or hardware is self-destructive.

It is valuable (and economical) to constantly remind yourself that a whole lot more great art was created on considerably less sophisticated technology that whatever you’re working with right now than you are likely to produce in seven lifetimes. If you can accomplish whatever work you need to be doing with whatever tool you have in your office, closet, classroom, or business, you are sufficiently up-to-date. Do work and forget about the color-of-the-designer-magazine-week bullshit.

Genuine People Personality

There is new level of user-hostility in all current and popular computer operating systems--OS X, Android, and Win 7/8--that astounds me. I suppose it’s the result of hacking, identity theft, and the fact that most current computer owners do not qualify as computer “users.” That does not make it right, useful, or something we should learn to tolerate.

For more than a decade, I’ve said, “The first company that designs an OS that pays attention to the users’ input, first, and the programmers’ background maintenance bullshit, second, will blow Apple and Microsoft out of business in less than a month.” For thirty years, Microsoft’s mantra has been, “We don’t have to be great, we only have to be better than our competition.” Since Apple and Google are the only other game in town, and those two companies suck, Microsoft’s game has become soft. In a competitive world, that would mean that the market is ripe for a new kid in town. This is not a competitive world. The various incarnations of open-source UNIX/LINUX have, for example, not exactly shaken the ground the Big Boys play on.

In trying to “upgrade” my two laptop systems—a Dell Latitude E6400 and a MacBook Pro 2,2—so that I can abandon both of my desktop systems—a Dell tower and a Mac Pro G5—as part of our downsizing attempt, I am re-experiencing the pain of both Windows and OS X. The upgrade mostly consists of moving both machines to SSDs. When I put an SSD in my little Dell Netbook, that sluggish machine became my go-to computer on our trip because it was fast, reliable, small and light, and durable. The MacBook Pro was the opposite of all of those characteristics, so it mostly languished in it’s bomb-proof Pelican case and wasted valuable space for five months. When I did need it, it required several hours of maintenance because the poor layout and cheap fans gummed up with New Mexico dust after a few hours of use. I ended up rebuilding the fans, with actual bearing grease instead of the fish oil Apple’s suppliers used. They have been working for a few hundred hours, quietly and dependably, since.

The SSD installation went quickly (about 2 hours) and, mostly, flawlessly on the Dell laptop, thanks to Samsung’s installation software. My old Dell Latitude E6400 runs like a brand new machine. Pro Tools 10, Sonar X3, Vectorworks, and the usual Office suspects flawlessly and instantly. So far, I consider this move to be a success.

The MacBook installation was as painful as most Apple software/hardware experiences, made even more difficult by the fact that I decided to dig into the physical MacBook to clean and reinstall the heatsink thermal grease, since MacBooks are notorious for overheating and failing in moderate temperatures. (In case you are interested in making this repair, it is only possible on the older MacBook Pro laptops. Apple has not only made the newer models, especially the Retina models, unserviceable and considerably more fragile.)

Counting the disassembly hassle (massively more difficult for the Mac than the Dell), I have about 9 hours invested in the Mac and after the 3rd failed Disk Utilities software installation attempt, I took the excellent advice from other Apple product owners, I gave up on the Apple OS X built-in cloning software and used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). Three hours later, my MacBook was up and running. In fact, running considerably more reliably (after downloading a “trim” enabling utility, since Apple only supports its own overpriced SSDs in its usual user-hostile customer disservice manner).

I had the opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison between my newly enabled MacBook Pro and a 2013 MacBook Pro with Intel's Haswell-based Core i5 processor and an Apple-installed SSD. On every functional “benchmark,” we found my old duo-core MacBook was as quick, in practical terms, as the far more expensive, less-featured (except for Thunderbolt) newer model. Counting the Samsung SSD, I now have $500 invested in my MacBook Pro. After the heatsink repair, the main and video processors are running about 50F cooler at max fan speed and 15F cooler at the lowest fan speed. Of course, some of that could be due to the extreme air-path cleaning I gave the laptop. It wasn’t all that dirty, though. On the other hand, Apple’s cheesy heatsink compound was dried into a crumbling thermal insulator that probably did more harm than good.

Proof in Pudding

July 2014

A while back, I referenced new knowledge (to me) about owning an acoustic guitar that I’d discovered in Allen St. John’s Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. If you look at the picture of me playing my new guitar and if you’ve read St. John’s book, you’d have to assume I learned absolutely nothing from Wayne Henderson. You might be wrong. I’m not a good enough guitarist to know much about the intricacies of acoustic guitars, but like all pedestrian art lovers “I know what I like.” I can’t describe it well enough to put forward any intelligent theories or descriptions, but I am reasonably sure I could put together a list of important criteria that might provide someone with a bigger brain some insight into what matters to me as a guitar player. 

The guitar I ended up with is a Composite Acoustics Cargo, that company’s entry into the environmentally indelicate travel guitar market. Here’s what CA has to say about the Cargo, “A travel size instrument that sounds like a full size guitar? Impossible! Our Cargo is comfortable to play anywhere, from the forests of Oregon to the foothills of the Catskill mountains, and even in your favorite armchair. Finely appointed and incredibly durable, the Cargo is ready when you are. It easily fits airline overheads or anywhere space is tight. It's a portable guitar with the playability, sound and satisfaction of a full size guitar.”

Oddly, other than the exclamation marks, I pretty much agree with CA’s self-assessment. A friend called, knowing that I was looking for a replacement for my all-around-miserable Martin Backpacker travel guitar, saying that he’d found a used Cargo at a local guitar store and wanted to know if I was interested in tagging along to play it with him. We went to Willie’s American Guitars, first, to check out the Blackbird Rider (steel string). The Rider was pretty impressive, but at $1,600 I decided to wait until I’d sold my Martin 00016C before I plunked down another pile off money on a guitar I might not play. On we went to the next guitar shop where we played a used and purple 2008 (pre-Peavey) Cargo non-electric. The shop was asking $1,000 due to the “collector value” of the pre-Peavey status and Tim and I decided to pass for a while to see how the day’s comparisons sat. When I got home, I looked up current prices on the Cargo and found that $999 was a pretty common street price for the electric-capable version of the “raw carbon” version. Tim ended up ordering one from Sweetwater. About the time he ordered his, I found a used one with the “high gloss carbon burst finish” on Craig’s List. We ended up getting our hands on our new guitars at about the same time, same day, and damn near the same place. Tim’s is new, mine is pre-Peavey used. To my ears, they look and sound pretty much the same, except for string differences and the gloss finish on my guitar.

Ellis Seal, an aerospace engineer, began Composite Acoustics in 1999 and after several wrong steps, over-optimistically anticipating the market for the company’s products and under-pricing their products (at least pricing them so the company didn’t make enough profit to survive), CA went bankrupt in 2010. That same year, Peavey bought the remains and began marketing the carbon graphite guitars, pretty much unchanged, in early 2011. Since then, Peavey has refined some manufacturing processes, but kept the guitars themselves most intact; in spite of the fear-mongering some “vintage guitar” dealers are promoting. 

The Cargo is an interesting work in acoustics, psychoacoustics, nearfield design, art, engineering, and ergonomics. After I got my Cargo, Willie’s picked up another Rider and I went to the store with my guitar to compare the two. The Rider has the “advantage” of a smaller body, which makes it slightly easier to store or stuff into airline overhead baggage. That aspect of the Rider turns into a disadvantage when you are playing the guitar. It does not sit comfortably  in your lap like a guitar, unlike the Cargo. While the body of the Rider is more narrow, it is also deeper so the total stored volume is pretty similar. From a distance, the two guitars sound remarkably similar. From the player’s position, the Cargo has it all over the Rider. The sound hole is high and right under the player’s face, providing more low end to that listening position than the Rider. The body shape of the Cargo puts a very resonant part of the guitar’s back right against your chest and rib cage, providing low frequency bone conduction. Just holding the guitar away a fraction of an inch or wearing a coat is enough to lose this portion of the bottom end. It is a brilliant solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem with a small body guitar. Both guitars have excellent pickups; the Rider the Fishman MiSi pickup electronics, with a tone control, and the Cargo has a less-featured but very competent LR Baggs pickup. With a half-decent acoustic guitar amplifier, the Rider’s tone controls would be unnecessary. 

Your mileage may vary, but I am more than satisfied with my Composite Acoustics Cargo electric and expect to be playing this guitar for years. When a friend first saw the CA guitars at a NAMM show, the company had three of their instruments on stands under a running waterfall. The demonstrator just pulled a guitar out of the water, shook it off, and started playing. That’s not all that far from the kind of environment living in an RV can be. 

POSTSCRIPT: A couple of years ago, after moving to Red Wing, a friend decided he also needed a travel guitar. He actually travels, so "needed" was more realistic for him than me. Through an industry connection, he spotted a used CA Cargo for a decent price . . . but it was red. I loved my old black sunburst Cargo, but I kind of don't care about color all that much, so I offered to trade if he really didn't like the red guitar. He didn't, so we traded. 

Since then, I've added a few "features" to the new Cargo (this one is, I think, a Peavey manufactured guitar). The setup wasn't great, so I made a new saddle and dressed the frets a bit. I experimented with an "arm rest" when I was having arthritis issues with my right hand and found that the guitar was substantially louder and more full sounding without my arm resting on the top (Go figure!). For several years, I got to play the black Cargo occasionally and I'm sorry to say I still like it slightly better than the red guitar, but I still kind of don't care much. My friend died recently and his wife sold the Black Cargo to a local musician. It went to a good home. The Cargo is so much my go-to guitar that it lives in the room where I do most of my living, writing, reading, and thinking. After 8 years, it is still my favorite guitar. 

Sad to say, Peavey couldn't figure out how to make and sell the Composite Acoustics line and it has languished on their website with no available inventory or support for at least 4 years. 

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Everything into Anything

 A year or so ago, I realized I had a perfectly good steel box for which I had no actual purpose. Too big to make into a guitar petal, too small for most other purposes. At the time, I also had a bunch of conversion projects: getting -10dBV stuff into +4 stuff and high to low impedance matching stuff and other unbalanced to balanced issues. Even weirder, I had a pair of vintage RCA line-matching transformers with no place to go.

What you see in these pictures is my wife's artistic decoration of my Everything into Anything case. I had something less 60's in mind, but you can not guide art. The other thing you might notice is the 1/4" (TRS or TS), RCA, and 1/8" stereo connectors on one side (for stereo input) and a pair of XLR connectors with a ground lift switch on the opposite side. With a slight amount of loading, you can connect any of the left side unbalanced connectors to any of the other left side connectors to "adapt" connectors. Going through the unbalanced side to the balanced side you pass through some big iron transformers for isolation and signal balancing. The ground lift switch disconnects the balanced side from chassis ground. So far, only one application with which I've used this product has needed the ground lift protection, but most live applications probably would.

The box is heavy. Both the transformers (which fit wall-to-wall in the case) and the steel case add both mass and electromagnetic isolation from 60Hz noise sources. I transferred a crapload of 1/4" 15ips analog tape recordings to digital in a two month period with this rig and none of the typical ground issues that came with old Teac reel-to-reel recorders ended up in the transfers. I used the box for a DI with a 1970's Yamaha DX1 synth in the studio and the combination of the balancing transformers and ground lift gave the quietest signal I've received from that ill-designed semi-analog synth.

Honestly, I'd have liked to include a few other connectors on the box; just for the fun of it. However, there was no room in the inn. The transformers and XLRs take up all of the available space, which actually created additional shielding.

Fun project and useful. Of course, finishing it up a few months before I retired is about par for the course. I could have used this thing most everyday for the last two decades.

Getting A Wish and Wishing I Hadn’t

When I first started playing guitar, 54 years ago, I had a garbage Sears acoustic my father paid $12 for and gave me for Xmas. It was an awful looking sunburst piece of junk with strings about 1/2” above the fretboard and the sound quality of a banjo. I loved it, but felt the need to “fix” it after I played a friend’s Gibson. I sanded the paint job off of the top and neck, refinished the neck and body with rubbing oil of some sort, and made my first shot at dressing a fretboard and bridge. It played better, but still sounded like crap.

The first time I abandoned rock and roll, when I was 19, I moved to Dallas, Texas and traded all of my electric stuff for a Gibson J45 acoustic. At the time, I thought it was a great guitar. I played that instrument for the next 20 years and was reasonably satisfied with it. Totally on a whim, in 1980 I bought an Alvarez-Yari DY-87 double-neck acoustic that I loved to death. I sold the J45 to a friend and band mate and played the hell out of the Alvarez-Yari until I moved to Colorado in ‘91. I’d gotten back into recording and the double-neck recorded horribly.

On another whim, I decided to sell the Alvarez-Yari and buy a guitar I’d always dreamed about, a Martin. I found a “good deal” on a 00016C and bought it from a Denver session player who was down on his luck and needed rent money. From the day I owned that guitar, I loved-hated it. I always assumed that relationship was due to the fact that I pretty much quit playing not long after buying the Martin. It was used in a bunch of recording sessions, by other players, over the next two decades, but I barely picked it up. It recorded well, but I never liked the way it sounded to me while I played it. I bet I didn’t put 50 hours of practice on that guitar in 20 years. Honestly, I eventually flat-out disliked my Martin and didn’t think much of myself as a guitar player, either.

After reading Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, I began to suspect there was a lot more to picking an acoustic guitar than I was capable of comprehending or appreciating. When my daughter Holly asked me to help her pick out an acoustic guitar as a present for her husband, I reluctantly agreed to try and help. My reluctance was all about doubting my ability to hear a good guitar when I played one. However, once I started picking up guitars, playing them, listening to them, and moving from one to another, I got absorbed in the project and lost my inhibitions. Eventually, I settled on a Seagull acoustic that I really loved. She bought it. Sherm loves it too. And I decided to rid myself of my Martin.

It went quickly. I don’t miss it, but after playing my crappy backpacker all winter I am wishing for an acoustic guitar that I might love. Yesterday, I played Sherm’s Seagull and I still like it (it needs new strings, Sherm). I don’t know what that means because one thing Holly and I learned when I was picking Sherm’s guitar is that all Seagulls of the same model do not sound or play alike. I might not be able to find another like his. This could be a long process. Acoustic instruments are incredibly personal and that is a lesson that took me 50 years to learn.

Technorati Tags: acoustic,music,guitar,segull,martin,alvarez-yari

Enforcement or Reinforcement?

Last night, I met a friend at a downtown St. Paul bar to hang out after being away for the winter. The bar has a barely-attended open mic on Mondays, so that was supposed to be our background. As usual, that was a mistake. Even though all of the performers were "acoustic musicians" doing folk songs and folk interpretations of pop songs, the sound system was cranked, painfully distorted, and grossly overbearing. Big surprise, right?

I worked for QSC Audio Products for a decade, back in the 80's. That came after 15 years of running my own engineering, service, sound reinforcement, and recording studio business. When I first stated working in audio manufacturing, I didn't think much about the moral aspect of what we were doing. Ten years late, hundreds of live sound gigs under my belt, tens of thousands of audio power amplifiers into the pipeline, and far too many conversations with live sound "engineers" and having suffered the result of providing deaf, stupid people with reliable high-powered amplification, I was pretty much done with the idea of live music as a morality-neutral business.

Our customers were about as concerned with musical fidelity as the two douchebags on the left. Too often, musicians are not performing art as much as they are shouting, "Look at me! Hey! I'm over here! Hey! Look!" Like spoiled 2-year-olds, they are not trying to entertain anyone other than themselves and they are willing to deafen anyone foolish enough to suffer their "art." Think South Park's "The F-Word," if you need more non-musical references. I began to think working for a cojppany whose primary purpose was to make music painfully, harmfully loud was less than ethical. It could be that I was just looking for a good reason to leave southern California, but my dislike for over-amped musical performances has tenaciously hung-on.

To my ears, the two things that make live music less than enjoyable are loudness and lousy tone. In many ways, the two are attached. Poor mic technique came about in an irrational effort to "improve" gain-before-feedbacik. Performers sacrificed quality, dynamics, and detail for loudness. Acoustic guitar pickups are a consistent source of lousy tone and, like poor microphone technique, the whole justification for those awful, twangy things that train listeners to expect awful tone from acoustic instruments is loudness and freedom from microphones. Performers who want their audience to know how special their instrument sounds use either no amplification or employ high quality condenser microphones and use those instruments as competently and flexibly as a talented vocalist.

The problem isn't the feedback, it's the volume of performances. At some time in the 60's, sound systems moved from being reinforcement to an attempt to enforce attention from the audience. It didn't work. It shouldn't work. It's a non-musical concept.

Good Advice

Getting Fired Moments

One of the instructors I worked with at McNally Smith College of Music, Bryan Forrester, used to described the Pre/Post monitor fader buttons as the “get fired buttons.” The idea being that if you decided to play with those buttons after getting a monitor mix going, you might subject your talent to a burst of ear-damaging noise and get your lame ass fired as a result. I adopted that in my own laboratory classes and expanded the concept to include things like damaging equipment, being late to a class/session, acting unprofessionally, and being lazy or slow. “If you ever notice that I am working harder than you, assume you won’t be called back to work with me again.”

Most “students” convinced themselves that I was kidding, that the working world wouldn’t be that harsh. At a dead minimum, 99% of the school’s graduates have only “worked” in a professional musical environment once or twice before retiring to their parents’ basement and a part-time career in fast food service. The problem with doubting reality is that reality could give a shit what you think.

In a competitive market, and it’s hard to imagine a market that could be more competitive than music and music technology, there are more reasons to fire someone than to hire them. While the media is packed with feel-good stories about people who failed and became successful, real life has a much larger inventory of people who failed and crawled back into bed. The difference between the two is how hard the first group worked to prove they weren’t members of the second group.

In a world booby-trapped with “get fired” moments, I recommend that you consider the possibility that your mother isn’t the best judge of your talents; for better or worse. You are unlikely to find an employer who will put up with laziness of any sort. You are unlikely to get second chances; let alone third, fourth, and so on chances. You need to listen carefully, take notes, do what you’re asked to do, do it fast, and try to make your self useful to your customers, whoever they may be. Any other approach is not a serious effort.

What Am I Doin’ Here?

For 12 oddly inconsistent years, I pretended to be a college instructor at a private college in St. Paul. If you know me even a little you know that academia is pretty much the last institution on the planet that should have adopted me. I grew up in an educators’ household, my father was a business/math teacher and my step-mother was a piano teacher, but as David Sedaris wrote, “Like branding steers or embalming the dead, teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered.”

In fact, I have branded steers and it wasn’t bad work, other than the company and the low pay. 100 years ago, I would have considered that to be pretty good work and I’d have still avoided teaching. I have never figured myself for an undertaker, though. When I decided, thanks for the non-existent knowledge of my high school’s “advisors,” that my talent for mathematics qualified me to be an accountant or a math teacher, I sailed my ship toward a life as a rock & roll star. Nobody in Dodge City High School’s 1965 faculty imagined a kid from our armpit of a town could become an “engineer,” unless a striped hat and the Santa Fe Railroad was involved.

When I hear media morons denigrate teachers, especially K-12 teachers, I try to remember that these characters probably had a long string of bad teachers who were well deserved by their students; assuming the media morons are typical of the material they had to work with. It’s a nasty job and no one who has a choice would do it under the usual conditions. When I started, it was not under anything resembling usual conditions. I lucked into a situation with great management, a strong program, and wonderful students. It didn’t last, but the fact that it ever existed is pretty amazing and unusual.

Fascinated by Complication

Almost thirty-five years ago, when I first started messing around with computers for a living, the company with which I was employed bought a giant Gerber CAD system. Seriously. The thing was huge. The CPU took up a large closet-sized metal rack, the D-size printer used pens for crap’s sake, the “memory” was reel-to-reel and almost stored enough information to draw a kiddies’ picture. The company’s CEO had seen a demonstration of the Gerber nightmare and, being the clueless little dork he was, put down his unearned million dollars for a pair of work stations. It was up to the Engineering Department to turn this horrible investment into something productive.

We failed. We failed miserably. It took an engineer and a draftsman hours to do the same work a draftsman could have done in a few minutes. A whole schematic took days. A mechanical drawing burned up lifetimes. Even more fun, the printing process would often crash the drawing and those hours, days, and lifetimes would start all over again. The CEO and his suited crowd of Yes Men often stood by the printer, proudly watching the damn thing pick pens and drag ink across paper. When the paper ripped or the pens started drawing gobblygook, the suits would scurry away like cockroaches when the lights come on. After a year of wrestling with finding ways to turn a few hours work into a month of misery, I quit and escaped to a small manufacturer where I hoped to never see a computer again.

Two years later, I was in California working for another small manufacturer. For the first year, I’d wrestled with the company’s Wang “word processor” and the god-awful database the CFO had begun in Wang Basic. He’d started with the wild hope that he could figure out the programming language, given up, hired a “consultant” who’d really made a mess out of the idea, given up again, hired me and assigned me with the task of making this mess work. With a $10,000 price tag on a new 5M hard drive, he’d convinced himself that it could be done with enough brilliant work. I was supposed to provide the brilliance.

I cheated, eventually. Wang Basic wasn’t up to the task of providing a database that could manage our parts inventory and ordering system, our product BOM structure, and our produce revision history. So, I bought a brand new, post-bankruptcy, Osborne Executive, bootlegged a copy of DBase (for CP/M), created the BOM history with SuperCalc (came bundled with the Osborne), ported that to DBase, and began providing written inventory reports, purchasing schedules, and assembly documentation from DBase. Eventually, all of the company’s execs bought dirt cheap Osbornes from the local Xerox store and we all started using the same software. After a few years, we all moved over the DOS-based IBM AT-clone computers from a local company, AST Research (remember when American companies make computers? I do.). We upped our software game to FoxBase II, Supercalc II, Word, and, eventually, added design analysis and CAD to our systems.

All that harmony didn’t last long, though. Our marketing department, always looking for ways to blow money and exempt themselves from responsibility, responded to Apple’s bullshit “a computer for the rest of us” campaign and bought the biggest piece of shit ever foisted on the world as a “computer.” Suddenly, nothing could be done at that end of the company without consultants: computer consultants, marketing consultants, graphics consultants, artistic consultants, concept consultants, and management consultants. Since the Mac couldn’t talk to anything on the accounting, manufacturing, customer or billing, sales, or any other area of the company, marketing had successfully isolated itself from work. As far as I know, the company’s marketing department is still perfectly useless. Nothing in their advertising from the last 30 years proves otherwise.

Near the end of my time in California, a friend/employee was working on a show band project. He’d collected a group of wonderful musicians and singers, written several great R&B tunes, spent a butt-load of money on a sound system, and rehearsed the band until they were ready for a show case performance in front of some industry clowns. The problem was that he’d been reading too much Electronic Music bullshit and had bought into the idea that a Mac was a music machine and that Mac’s GUI-based MIDI software was the way to go for live performance. Remember, in 1990, the Apple Mac worked so slowly that it resembled Facebook’s crappy text editor in speed. Someone like me, who could type about 60w/m would be driven nuts by the Mac’s inability to keep up, on screen. If you foolishly watched the screen while you typed, you’d go crazy with the slowly crawling characters appearing seconds after you’d typed them.

After failing to be able to run his show by himself, my friend hired me to run FOH and run the MIDI show. I went to several practices, fought with the sluggish and unstable Mac and MOTU’s POS Digital Performer software, and pissed off everyone by my inability to keep the whole mess together; it was a 10-piece band sync’d to a glitchy Mac and MIDI. When we moved to a rehearsal hall, a couple of weeks before the performance, I suddenly “fixed” everything. I’d ported his Performer data to straight MIDI, moved that to a Compaq “portable” computer, loaded up Cakewalk (for DOS), and sync’d the live band to the MIDI performance coming from a Yamaha DX1 and my Kurzweil modules. My friend never knew that his Mac was no longer in the loop and the show came off fine.

Due to other issues, I’d pretty much exhausted my patience for Southern California by then and a few months later I left the state. He went back to trying to make the Mac drive the show and a few months later the band folded. Over the years, I’ve been amused to see Apple continuously turn simple stuff into massively unmanageable complexity and Apple’s Kool-Aid Kids have grown to be the largest cult outside of the Catholic Church.  Even to this day, Microsoft is the primary reason Apple can still sell its overpriced, cluttered, unpredictable, trendy computers. You wouldn’t know it from the crazy stuff Apple’s Kiddies say, though. Listening to them, you’d deliriously imagine that Apple had done something other than exactly what my California company’s marketing department did; separate itself from actual work and redefine “function” as inept complexity.

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